No Place to Hide

If you think your secrets are safe, Read about al Schweitzer, Private Eye

When America's top tabloid, the National Enquirer, needed an instant profile on Jeffrey Dahmer, the editors' first call was to a 33-year-old private detective who plied his spookery in the shadow of Washington State's Mount Rainier. Today that source, Al Schweitzer, is facing prison for being too good at his trade. But in better times he billed himself as the nation's foremost information broker, and he still recalls with pride how he serviced the Enquirer's request for background information on the murderer from Milwaukee.

"They wanted Dahmer's phone number, tolls and military criminal history," says Schweitzer. "I got it all. There were only three numbers on his phone bill. Two to gay bars in Chicago and one to the manufacturer of those fifty-five-gallon barrels he put the body parts in."

To scam Dahmer's numbers from Wisconsin Bell, Schweitzer posed as a lineman calling in for instructions. It was a favorite ruse, one he's also used to help the Enquirer and other clients play havoc with the private lives of Hollywood stars.

"I should put out a directory," he muses. "One of those star maps with every celebrity's unlisted phone number on it, plus a description of how you figure out new numbers and addresses when they change them."

Until the government stomped on him, Schweitzer was the unchallenged impresario of one-stop shopping in the underground privacy mart, the guy you could rely on to get just about anything not on the public record. Over three years, he earned $2 million by filching and fencing everything from unlisted phone numbers to confidential credit histories. He virtually invented the art of conning phone companies out of their deepest trade secrets. His client list includes 500 private investigators, as well as hotels, airlines and other companies. In fact, many of his job orders came from insurance companies looking for nonpublic Social Security information in order to verify routine workmen's compensation claims.

Not that people in high places aren't catching on. Twice the Justice Department has paid Schweitzer the backhanded compliment of making him the scapegoat for the U.S.'s privacy crisis.

In 1989 he was indicted for allegedly trying to subvert an IRS agent. The case was dropped, but two years later he and 17 others, including his wife, were charged with attempting to compromise the Social Security Administration's central computer. All pleaded guilty, but only three--one of them Schweitzer--received jail sentences. The Justice Department called the roll-up one of the most important computer fraud cases in U.S. history. Yet, to an outsider, the truly striking thing is the case's selectivity. The government failed to go after the clients that Schweitzer serviced--all of whom were, in effect, his accomplices.

When Schweitzer complained that he'd been unfairly singled out, an FBI agent told him the government's objective was to cripple the info-brokerage business by "cutting off the legs." Schweitzer says such action will only drive up the price of purloined "private facts" as newcomers who have learned his tricks step in to take up the slack.

Al Schweitzer didn't exactly step out of a Raymond Chandler novel. OK, he once shadowed a woman to a pharmacy in the (continued on page 142)no place to hide(continued from page 134) Seattle area to find out what medication she was on (it was for herpes), and occasionally he'll rifle a target's trash cans. But fieldwork is not his choice and his favorite weapon is not a snub-nosed .38. It is a telephone, which he uses to seduce potential sources and even Ma Bell herself. His rule of thumb: Never show your face.

To reach Schweitzer you call his private 800 number, which is a telling introduction. Any call to an 800 number automatically produces a toll record of the caller's location, but competitors who try to tease that file out of a phone company will discover that 800 records are the hardest to find. Right off the bat, Schweitzer is a step ahead of his competition.

For his first on-the-record press interview, Schweitzer shows up in baggy purple shorts and a cutoff Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirt. His bristling haircut and his chain-smoking are holdovers from his days as a peacetime U.S. Army enlistee, and he speaks with the bluff staccato of Claude Akins pitching Aamco auto repairs. On first encounter, this premiere information scavenger comes across like an aggressively genial repo man, the twitching mustache and piano-key smile poor camouflage for a personality brimming over with yuppie acquisitiveness.

At his home in Sumner, Washington, a half hour drive from Seattle, the ravages of multiple lawsuits have left Schweitzer short of furnishings. He has managed to hold on to a dachshund named Dynamite, as well as a Ranger bass boat and an extensive weapons collection. The only thing wrong with his state-of-the-art stereo is that he plays it a little too loud. This, he explains, is to frustrate eavesdroppers.

Not far away, on Sumner's Main Street, Schweitzer's two-room office sits atop a bar named Sharkey's, within earshot of the railroad tracks where the freights rumble past five times a day. The FBI brought in dollies a year ago and cleaned out the place, leaving only a few sticks of furniture and a World War One helmet. When a visitor arrives, Petra Schweitzer, a striking baby-faced blonde who doubles as her husband's secretary, offers coffee and then disappears to let the two talk.

Schweitzer has another rule of thumb: Never tell on yourself.

But like all con men, he is an actor, unable to resist a bit of grandstanding.

He eventually cracks the door on himself, while letting you know that there's no place to hide from the likes of him.

After leaving the Army in 1980, says Schweitzer, he worked as a bouncer and a pile driver in California. He then became an apprentice P.I. doing undercover jobs for the cops in Silicon Valley. Both he and his wife posed as coke brokers inside some of the Valley's toniest firms, hauling down 20 buyers in one sting alone.

In this capacity he honed the acting skills that would later serve him well. But he also burned out fast and became disenchanted with the way private investigators operate. Most of them, he says, are retired FBI agents or cops who don't have the foggiest idea how to get information without a badge or subpoena power.

Schweitzer decided to make up for that deficiency by cobbling together a network of sources whose wisdom he could sell back to his gumshoe friends. In 1986, with $5000 in his pocket, he and his wife hung out a P.I. shingle in rural Washington. They dubbed themselves the Information Desk and went hunting for what they needed. "While everybody was chasing clients, I was chasing sources," Schweitzer recalls gleefully. "Sources make the world go round."

The search was improvisatory. There are no rule books. Schweitzer staked out bars and airline terminals, striking up conversations with strangers, taking names and addresses when he happened upon someone who worked for a phone company or utilities firm. He haunted employee parking lots outside banks and credit bureaus and noted the license-plate numbers of the shabbier cars. The condition of the vehicle, says Schweitzer, is a clue to those who may be willing to spy for extra cash. Meanwhile, he raided the source lists of other P.I.s, slyly inserting himself between client and provider, always offering the source a little more than he was already getting.

Above all, Schweitzer listened to the cupidity in his soul and made it his guide. "Everybody has a price," he says. "It's just a matter of finding out what it is." In two years he paid one source $80,000 without tax vouchers, an oversight that eventually got Schweitzer in dutch with the IRS. He compromised three or four other sources for $15,000 a year, but more often the going rate per job was $100 to $200, depending on what he was looking for. Information and instructions were invariably traded over the phone, and payments were made in cash by way of Federal Express overnight letters with blind return addresses--all in keeping with Schweitzer's passion for anonymity. Often, he'd have a particularly productive source set up a front company and receive payments through it so a contract employee's 1099 form could be issued at year's end to keep the IRS happy.

Schweitzer wasn't above pressuring sources into working for him, either. When he'd discover, for instance, that a customer-service rep or utilities account manager at a phone company was already servicing another P.I., he'd cold-call the compromised soul and warn that if he or she didn't come to work for him, the boss might find out.

Eventually, though, the reach of Schweitzer's expanding business outstripped the reach of his sources. Particularly disruptive was the forced breakup of the phone companies, which immediately multiplied the number of targets he had to access for unlisted numbers and phone tolls. To compensate for the resulting gaps in his human circuitry, he began relying on his thespian skills to con what he couldn't steal. He quickly mastered the finer points of the computer-age scam.

"It's important to remember," says Schweitzer, "that customer-service reps are there to be helpful." Also vital: "By claiming to be the person whose records you are requesting, you can get ninety percent of what you're after." And finally: "Creditors talk to creditors, banks talk to banks and phone companies talk to phone companies. So if you pretend to be a rep from one of those outfits and call for information from another, you're likely to get it."

In the argot of the trade, such scams are known as "gags" or "pretexts," and you have to be shameless--with a touch of Brando--to pull them off.

"Let's say I'm out to get your bank account and I already know your name, address and phone number," Schweitzer posits. "I'll just call up the phone company and be you. I'll say, 'You're not going to believe this, Ma Bell. I know I paid you last month, but I forgot to write it in my check register. Can you tell me what day you got that and how much it was for? And by the way, when is my next bill due and for how much?' The customer-service rep will be glad to help.

"Now I change hats," Schweitzer continues. "With this information, and pretending to be the phone company, (continued on page 162)no place to hide(continued from page 142) I'll call you and say, 'Sorry to trouble you, sir, but we haven't received May's payment of $109.32. Is there a problem?' You protest and pull out your checkbook to prove you've paid. I then say, 'What account was that drawn on so we can run a trace?' Even for the guy who pays his bill regularly, this is a chance to poke corporate America in the eye. He'll tell you the account number and the bank."

Another example: "I know that you're trying to buy a car from Sunset Chevrolet. I call up Sunset and pretend to be another creditor looking for you, complaining that you've been with us for sixty days and we're getting returned mail already. Sunset's credit department is going to be more than willing to pull the application you just filed and give me the address and phone numbers you provided, plus your references and bank account number.

"Or maybe I pretend to be from the jury commissioner's office and call you and say, 'You've failed to respond to our summons for jury duty, so a warrant has been issued for your arrest.' In this scenario, I would then offer to straighten out everything and at the end nail you by saying, 'You know, you're entitled to a per diem sent directly to the bank of your choice. Where would you like that deposited?'

"Once I find out that information," Schweitzer continues, "I can then attach your account, if I'm into a credit action, or I can call up your bank, pretending to be from another bank or credit-card company, and scam your average monthly balance right over the phone. I'd say, 'Hi, this is Al Smith over at Citibank. We have a cardholder who's asked for a major increase in his credit line. Could you rate his account for me?' Most banks will give you round figures over the phone, plus the date the account was opened and the number of returned checks within given periods."

As Schweitzer describes his gigs, his face flushes, and you can tell that this is where he lives. He tells you other war stories, about how, posing as a hapless traveler who has just lost his credit cards or checkbook, he can trick account numbers out of the bank or credit-card company. Or how, in the guise of an oppressed husband whose wife has heisted his Visa card and gone on a shopping spree, he can persuade the credit-card company to give him the real husband's account number and the latest charges against it. Or how Petra Schweitzer, posing as a doctor's aide, can cajole your doctor's secretary into giving up your latest prescriptions.

"Banks, credit-card activity, phone numbers, long-distance tolls, nonpublished addresses all can be done by pretext," Schweitzer explains. He then dares you to test him. For argument's sake, you tell him you want something simple, like an address. He smiles patronizingly, as if this is child's play.

"I can pose as the local radio station offering you prize tickets. Where do we send them?" he says. "Or, I'm the welcoming committee in your town. Or the squinty-eyed UPS dispatcher who can't read the address on a package for delivery. So I call you to check it. That's wonderful at Christmastime.

"There are a thousand variations. And the more stupid I sound, the more information I get. It's almost a double joke because the guy at the other end of the line hangs up and says, 'God, what an idiot!' And I hang up and say, 'What anidiot!' since I got exactly what I wanted."

Actually, it isn't always that easy. Flicking through his own advertising brochure, Schweitzer points to certain offerings that can be had only through an inside source. The Internal Revenue Service is a tough target, he explains. So is American Express, because it has a rule against sharing information on the phone with representatives, genuine or otherwise, of other credit-card companies. Nor is it simple to trick Swiss bankers out of client information, or to dupe the FBI or local police departments into giving you data from the National Crime Information Center, a computerized data bank that links all police blotters in the country. In these instances, says Schweitzer, you have to know somebody on the inside.

Still, the expanding links among information systems, the pooling of information in the NCIC, the lack of adequate policing mechanisms within credit bureaus--all these factors have helped ease the poacher's burden. Even the formidable IRS, Schweitzer found, will share information if the seeker, posing as a state official, can claim that the handout is to be used to track a parent who's defaulted on child support.

Such hard-learned lessons quickly boosted Schweitzer's income. By keeping his overhead low and by billing clients at least double the price of each piece of information he filched, Schweitzer banked $287,000 in his first 15 months on the job and four times that amount in 1988.

Soon everybody he'd ever worked for was a client. He picked up the National Enquirer by apprenticing with, and then replacing, a senior P.I. who had long serviced the tabloid. He saved a mercenary from prosecution by linking him through phone records to a top-secret U.S. spy agency. When major-league baseball asked an investigative firm to profile prospective Texas Rangers owner George Bush, Jr., Schweitzer supplied the information. He also assisted a Texas group that specializes in locating abducted children.

In the process, he helped transform the bootleg information industry. "When I started doing this business," he says, "there was maybe the guy who could get you a phone number, or the guy who could get you a federal form. But no one had one-stop shopping, and that was the key."

Schweitzer earned a reputation for working fast and selling cheap. "I could have your phone number in three minutes and sell it for fifty dollars," he boasts. "I could have your phone bill within the hour and sell it for a hundred and a half, no matter how big it was. Your credit-card charges, I'd have in minutes."

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Schweitzer quickly qualified as the odds-on favorite of his peers. Within a year of his professional debut, P.I.s around the country began peddling the same services he did and then subcontracting their work to him. Ronald Saranow, once the IRS's chief investigator for Los Angeles, bought information from him. Business Risks International, a company later acquired by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, paid Schweitzer more than $80,000 for a variety of services. Star gumshoe Vincent Parco of New York, Nicholas Beltrante, the dean of Virginia's P.I.s, and Bill Roemer, the ex-FBI agent who wrote Man Against the Mob, all turned to him for help. And when "Gentleman P.I." Bill Dear appeared on The Pat Sajak Show and offered to demonstrate how a small piece of information like a license plate could be turned into a full personality profile, it was Schweitzer who performed the magic.

Particularly gratifying for Schweitzer is the number of ex-law enforcement officers who flocked to him. By his own estimate, 90 percent of his clients once carried a badge, and nearly half were formerly with the FBI. It is a source of dark amusement for him that the P.I. who bought the Social Security information that got him indicted a second time had worked for the bureau.

There is a sobering lesson in that, Schweitzer says. "It means that whenever a former cop begins looking for a second career, he's going to gravitate to what he knows best--the information business. And that means the business will just keep on growing."

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In early 1988, to keep up with his mounting work load, Schweitzer hired a bag girl from a grocery store, a waiter from a four-star restaurant and a repo agent. He trained them, wrote scripts for them so they could imitate his methods and turned them into a crack office staff. He soon discovered, however, that they preferred tapping his sources to playing their parts, so a year later he dismissed them all. He watched as they hustled off to New York and Los Angeles to spread their knowledge viruslike among other P.I.s. Meanwhile, by his own account, he developed a bad attitude and got overly greedy. Above all, he wanted to penetrate the IRS. So when a girlfriend--his marriage was on a brief hiatus--offered to introduce him to a potential IRS informant, he bit. It was a setup: The IRS man coaxed him into offering a bribe. An indictment, the first one against him, came down in March 1989.

Afterward, Petra persuaded him to sell Information Desk to a friend, who, he says, reneged on the deal. That, plus legal costs, forced Schweitzer back into brokering. But no sooner had he activated a dormant company known as Security Group and got the phones humming again than he was lured into another trap. This one was set up by a pal, an ex-FBI man turned P.I. who was cooperating with the Justice Department. When Schweitzer dutifully tried to fill his friend's request for Social Security data by approaching a middleman with an inside source, the trap was sprung. A second indictment, in December 1991, gave Schweitzer second thoughts about staying in the business.

How a man of his wiliness could have been twice duped is a question even Schweitzer can't answer. Perhaps greed explains it.

But the most sobering part of his story is what it tells us about our own vulnerability. Schweitzer argues that privacy is dead, though he's not ready to lay the blame principally on people such as himself. The real culprit, he maintains, is the consumer, who, in the name of convenience, routinely trades away the keys to his private kingdom.

"As part of daily life, we file for a driver's license and register our cars," he says. "Do you know how much that compromises us? If I run your plate through DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles] files, which are completely open, I'm going to get the name and address of the registered owner and of the legal owner, your bank or finance company. To track down a driver's license, you have to have a source in law enforcement. But driving records can be bought legally from any P.I. dealing in public documents--for about eleven dollars.

"Ditto boat or aircraft registration files, which can also be purchased directly from the county registrar or the FAA. All this can be a big start in undressing somebody."

Another lucrative public source, says Schweitzer, is the property registry in the local tax-assessor's office. He once found singer Janet Jackson's address in California through such records. Anybody could have unearthed it.

"And what about voter registration?" he continues. "I don't vote because my name, Social Security number, date of birth, occupation, address and phone number all go into the registrar's file, which is totally public. One phone call could get it. You don't even have to use a scam."

Schweitzer also places great stock in trash receptacles, which he characteristically compares to mirrors under a dress. He also relishes going through open court files, which, he claims, can be equally revealing. "In the muni [municipal] courts," he says, "speeding-ticket files may show a home phone number, occupation and whether or not you own another vehicle. A small-claims action may tell us if you pay your bills and if you're pursuing a second occupation under a DBA [doing business as] filing. In the past I have found cops on the take through DBA records because they often try to hide the bribes as additional income."

Along with criminal and civil records in the superior courts, Schweitzer looks hard at county files for background on divorces or inheritances. "If I uncover a divorce file," he says, "I've struck it rich, because often a financial accounting has to be made so the judge can divide property. I'm apt to find bank-account balances and numbers."

Of all the personal indexes generously given away by the unsuspecting, the most potentially damaging, says Schweitzer, is the Social Security number. It is, in his view, the "ultimate identifier, the key that unlocks most doors." With it, a deft P.I. posing as a creditor or a Social Security Administration official can lever private information out of the credit bureaus or even the administration itself.

The nation's three major credit bureaus--TRW, Trans Union and Equifax--are legally barred from giving full reports to anyone who doesn't meet the criteria laid out in the Fair Credit Reporting Act. But every creditor--from jewelry stores to finance companies--can qualify for access under these standards. All the con artist needs to do to get a corrupt one to run a check is slip about $100 under the table, along with the target's Social Security number.

Anyone armed with a Social Security number, moreover, can legally purchase the "top" of a credit report from the bureaus without meeting the criteria. The top has enough information to jump-start an investigation, including the name, address and date of birth of the number holder, plus similar background on five of his or her closest neighbors.

From his own business brochure, Schweitzer ticks off the offerings that are particularly Social Security sensitive.

• Credit history. "To get it legitimately," he says, "you go through a credit bureau and meet the legal requirements. I would call a friend at a repo or finance company and have him run the request."

• Social Security records for six years. "This would be had through a source at the federal Social Security office, or by pretexting a Social Security office in the guise of someone calling from another office where 'the computer is down.'"

• Wages for one year. "Nearly every state has an employee development office that keeps track of everybody's earnings for a year. I'd pretext these documents by calling, for instance, the California interstate unit and pretending to be from the Arizona office."

• Credit-card information. "I can identify your account at most credit-card companies simply by putting in your Social Security number. The data base will run a search and produce your name and address. I could then use that to set up a credit check."

• FBI criminal histories. "Given a target's name, birth date and preferably a Social Security number," says Schweitzer, "I can break out every charge and petty complaint ever lodged against that individual, whether he's guilty or not. If I was looking for files out of the NCIC, I'd need a source in law enforcement."

• Military criminal records. "For these files, you have to have a Social Security number, since that's how the military does business. The files are maintained in D.C. and aren't computerized. I'd call a source at the file center, and all he'd have to do is give his badge number and code and he can get whatever he wants."

Given the many ways a Social Security number can be exploited, it ought to be the best-kept secret. But as Schweitzer points out, it is offered freely to banks, phone companies, voter registrars and, in some states, to the DMV as a driver's license number. When spouses break up, it's left in divorce files, and when arrests are made, it winds up on the police blotter. No one would be so forthcoming with personal banking information. And yet, Schweitzer reminds us, anyone can access the automated phone teller at your bank simply by punching in your Social Security and account numbers. It's a trick he's used himself.

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A few years back, someone slipped Schweitzer salacious Polaroids of the main squeeze of a famous American entrepreneur. He resisted the temptation to sell the pictures to a tabloid. "I have a certain set of morals," he explains. But he didn't rush to dispose of the photos, either. "I think I just liked having the pictures in my drawer for a while," he says.

Schweitzer likes to speak of knowledge as power, and that's what the Polaroids symbolized for him: the power to muscle others.

Questioned about this, Schweitzer is quick to deny ever having used the power he's acquired for anything but professional ends. He's never dipped into his bag of tricks to settle a personal vendetta, he says. His work has been solely for his own financial gain, in keeping with his "moral values."

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At the time of arrest, Schweitzer was making his big money from the tabloids, helping them expose celebrities. In this connection, he is pretty upfront about lacking scruples. But he is a little defensive, too. "I didn't write those stories," he says. "All I did was track down particular pieces of information that they asked me to get."

Since a celebrity's privacy usually begins with an unlisted phone number and address, that's the kind of information Schweitzer specialized in. And despite his experience with Janet Jackson, he discovered that most high-profile types don't give themselves away in public property records or voter registration files. Instead, they have an accountant or business manager to front for them. To Schweitzer, though, such camouflage was barely an inconvenience. He simply worked around it by hustling the phone or utility company that serviced the celebrity or his or her next of kin.

To get an address out of a utility company, says Schweitzer, he would typically pose as a credit representative from an out-of-state utility firm. "If you call Southern California Edison and say you're from Puget Power in Washington looking for a skip who beat you for money, chances are they're going to come up with an address."

Another way he scored was by masquerading as the celebrity himself and querying a utility or phone company for the location of property purchased in the star's name. He once pulled this off by posing as singer Harry Connick, Jr. "I called the utility company and claimed to be him," Schweitzer recalls. "The girl on the other end gets all excited. I say, 'Listen, I don't mean to sound like an imbecile, but I have several homes. I've never been to this one.' She was more than helpful. I even offered to send her something for her trouble."

In duping the phone companies, says Schweitzer, the key was always knowing which department to contact and what slang to use. Over the years he has filched employee handbooks from scores of phone companies around the country, so he knew the names of many department heads and operators, as well as the designations and extensions of countless internal offices that never deal with the public. He also compiled a catalog of internal codes and colloquialisms that he used to gain the confidence of unsuspecting operators.

Posing as a repairman, for instance, he would typically call "Assignments," one of the most secret internal offices in any phone company, and ask for "cable and pair" information (if he was dealing with the Bells nationally) or "blocking" information (if he was targeting California GTE). These disparate code words would elicit the same data: unlisted addresses and phone numbers.

"Assuming I already knew the star's address and needed his phone number," says Schweitzer, "my basic repairman's pretext would run something like this: I would call up Assignments and say 'Hi, Mabel,' because I know her name, 'I'm out here chasing trouble on Main Street. Could you check for me and see if there's working service?' She would say, 'Yeah, I see two lines there.' Now, I'd come back (I don't hesitate, that's fatal) and say, 'What are they?' and she would give them to me."

Schweitzer says that working such cons is now getting harder because Ma Bell is getting wiser. Some phone companies, for example, now require repairmen to repeat a code when calling in, or insist on hearing a special tone or recorded music before parting with inside information. In each instance. Schweitzer claims, he's defeated the safety mechanism.

"And when all else fails," he adds, "there's always Mama. If any family members have called the star, that unlisted number is going to be on their bill, and I'm going to get it. Maybe I call Mama's phone company, pretending to be a phone rep from out of state looking to verify charges on an account. Or maybe I just call Mama herself and claim to be the local phone company chasing down false charges to her number. Either way, I'm going to get it."

Before the FBI shut him down, Schweitzer had compiled a virtual who's who in Hollywood for the National Enquirer. When Julia Roberts split from Kiefer Sutherland, Schweitzer used her phone bill to track him to his ranch in Whitefish, Montana. He copped Brando's tolls to locate his daughter in Tahiti. He discovered that Whoopi Goldberg's real name is Karen Johnson and that Ted Turner and Jane Fonda often hole up at their Montana ranch.

When Oprah Winfrey went on a diet, Schweitzer located her cook in Chicago. He also identified the lesbian lover of a young star, uncovered Delta Burke's real name and tracked Lou Ferrigno, Aretha Franklin, Mary Tyler Moore, James Franciscus, Shirley MacLaine, Michael Jordan, Madonna, Richard Dreyfuss, Kim Basinger and countless others with hidden addresses and phone numbers.

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Facing bankruptcy and a jail sentence, Schweitzer remains reluctant to part with his most valuable trade secrets. He might need them, as he puts it, "for a rainy day." He is particularly loath to elaborate on the innermost workings of the phone companies, though he is careful to couch his reticence in altruistic terms, claiming that any greater candor on his part could force Ma Bell to curtail certain services.

Somewhat incongruously, he is prepared to peddle his expertise to celebrities who wish to pay for help in protecting themselves from the likes of Al Schweitzer. He has even set up a new company, Privacy Consultants, to handle job orders once he disposes of his jail sentence.

On a public-policy level, Schweitzer feels, "we are in a big circle" that precludes any real progress toward greater privacy protection. The only way the government can limit the pilfering of information from criminal or Social Security files is through further access restrictions, he says. But the trend is actually in the opposite direction. Worse, there is no real constituency for change, in his view, because recession-squeezed citizens like their credit quick and easy and are far less sensitive than media stars to their vulnerabilities.

Despite the recent Justice Department crackdown, Schweitzer thinks the law has pulled its punches. "If the government actually wanted to put a stop to my industry," he says, "it would have to indict every client who bought information from me. That's fifteen hundred to two thousand people, including huge companies. I am no more guilty than any one of them."

The spectacle of Al Schweitzer coming on like a law-and-order Reaganite is perhaps a measure of how complex the privacy crisis has become. But even if the government followed his advice and punched out the big "end users" of purloined personal data, would that really make a difference?

Schweitzer again flashes a wry smile and shakes his head. "Anybody who thinks they can make themselves totally immune to privacy invasions is living in a fantasy world," he says. "As long as there are relationships between P.I.s and people who handle personal information, that information will be obtainable. You're not going to escape from somebody like me."

"'Let's say I'm out to get your bank account. I'll just call up the phone company and be you.'"

"'I could have your phone bill within the hour. Your credit-card charges, I'd have in minutes.'"